Reacting to IG Reels! (Why some work and some don’t.) 🧐

What's up, friend? Today we are reacting to Instagram reels put out by artists, visual artists, and musician stuff. This is gonna be really, really fun, and I'm excited to go through this with you. A couple things we're looking at here. We're not just watching this just to say, oh, this is cool. We want to look at this as a content strategy. Like, what are they doing to help them get more people in, get more eyeballs on their stuff, and maybe even sell more of their work or be able to do more of what they love. So that's the lens that we're coming at this through. So let's just jump into it. I've put all the artists in the description below that you should check out, because anybody that's doing high quality stuff like this should. They deserve attention. So go check it out.

I know that you think that we're pricing things wrong, but you wouldn't say that to Louis Vuitton. And we don't owe you affordability.

It's out of your budget. It's not overpriced. If we didn't need money.

So cool. Just beautiful work. I wish I could draw, but it's.

Not realistic, is it, Janet? You know, we've got bills to pay. We've got to feed ourselves. We need to earn what we're worth.

First of all, immediately, there's two things happening in this. This reel. One, we see work that is far enough along that makes us interested. And that's cool, because right away I'm like, oh, this guy's really good at what he does. On the flip side of that, we have this song that digs into a pain point that a lot of artists deal with, which is the pricing problem, feeling like their work isn't worth very much. So another thing that happens here that I'm noticing now is that he starts with something that's really eye catching, and that's this reverse of the picture, like, coming up, right? This reverse of the thing coming up. And that just brings our eye in right away, which is really cool. I'm really impressed by that, actually. So the three main reasons I think this reel works is, number one, he starts out with an interesting image that gets our attention. And then two, we get right into some really beautiful work that he's doing. And then three, he ends up catching us with that song that immediately gives us that feeling of like, oh, okay, we're gonna. We're gonna think about pricing, we're gonna think about these sorts of things. All, like, really interesting stuff for Artists. That's the key here is that I think this really resonated with artists. So let's kind of click around and see. Photographer. Yeah, yeah. Makeup artist, designer, illustrator. I'm just picking people at random here, by the way. So. So this is why this is so interesting to me is that we immediately see him connecting with somebody, but it's usually artists. Right? I think that's cool if that's who he's trying to reach. All right, let's go to the next one.

Oh my God.

Oh my gosh. This is awesome. So let's go in and look at the actual group. Half a million followers, which is awesome. Let's take check out some of their other content.

Remember when we posted about our New Year's resolution, the co founder and president of Seoul Cuisine, a plant based foods company, just DM'd us. There are some things that are happening here that I want to discuss, I think that are really interesting. That's amazing. Huge guitar, little guitar, which is a ukulele. I know. Relax everybody. So here's what I love about this. They're using a very mainstream approach where they're taking memes, all these other things and like putting them into their content strategy where they're getting average people involved. Right? They're getting people involved that are interested. So my big takeaways from just looking at this one group is one, they're looking to capture people's attention by doing something interesting, something over the top, and then they're taking that and when it gets them into their account. The second video we watched was that thing about them doing a New Year's resolution. And while I don't know anything about the band, what I learned is that they are into plant based things. So what does that teach us? We know something about them. So if you've heard me talk about strategy in terms of like building an audience around your art, this is what I'm talking about. You have your life, your regular life, which for them is like plant based eating. And then you have your creativity. And how those two things mix is the really cool thing. Alright, let's go to the next one.

Practice and practice and practice. Practice makes what? Absolutely not. Dismantle that belief system. Practice makes improvement. You can always better your best. You can always go beyond anything that you have ever done. You never hit a state of perfection. You're always bigger than what you do. And so all you're looking for are new breakthroughs. Through practice and practice and practice, you'll get better and better and better.

Yeah, I Love that.

Number one again. Compelling audio. Right. There's something that brings us in to a pain point. There's a feeling of practice, practice, practice. It's a very specific hook of practice makes perfect. You hear the audience, and then he says, no, dismantle that belief. I love that because immediately that hits a chord with us as artists and creatives. Right. Which is why I think it hit a chord with her. And we're seeing her do this painting from basically start to finish in a few seconds. I find that that does really well in terms of visual creativity. But let's talk about what I think is missing. First of all, I think it did well for artists. I don't know that this reached outside of the art zone. Why? Because we're touching on the pain point of other artists. So the second thing I want to look at here is really, if I go back to her profile, what am I going to learn about her? Okay, so we see here that she has an Etsy shop. And I actually love the way she pitches this. So she says, you know, it's been almost a year since I opened my Etsy shop, and she sort of talks about there, her internal struggle there. But that's cool because she's basically pitching her thing without pitching it. So let's take a look at her Etsy and see what we find. Okay, so 93 sales. I think that's cool. You know, if I was looking at it and we just did some math. So 93 sales times, let's call it $25 products, primarily. Yeah, so like $2,200, you know, from her Etsy shop. So I'm trying to analyze this to show, you know, are we getting people to where we want them to go with the stuff that we're making as creative? So if she's had $2,000 in sales, that's great. Let's call it 5,000 based on what her other stuff that's available is. Just to be fair, I personally can't live on $5,000. And that's not a dog against her. But what I'm getting at here is that if we want people to buy more stuff from us, I believe we have to do what the band was doing, which is like, hon on our belief systems, the things that make us unique, not just the work itself. And I think that's going to get more people engaged because they feel like, oh, we're the same, we're very similar. I think that's a really powerful option. Maybe you disagree. I'd love to know what you think in the comments below. So there you have it. The big takeaways here are, number one, make sure that you are putting things in your content that get people to also connect with you. It's okay to do something outrageous or do something trendy, right? But you can't just do trends or you're not going to let anybody know why they should like you. Especially if your goal as a creative is to grow an audience and then be able to, you know, make some money from that audience at some point. But let's get real for a second. Content strategies can feel really overwhelming. So you may look at this and be like, I just don't even have time for that right now. I just want to be more productive in my creativity and, you know, disciplined in the content stuff that I do. Go check this video out where I talk about how you can have creativity and discipline this year without white knuckling it. This isn't about content calendars and all that. This is about really looking inward and finding a balance for you.